He undressed slowly, and sat on his bed, watching his comconsole with the same malignant intensity with which Zap the Cat eyed a human bearing food. It remained silent. Chime, damn you. In the natural perversity of things, this ought to be the hour Illyan called him in, when he was tired and half-drunk and unfit to report. Now, Illyan. I want my mission! Every hour that passed seemed a greater strain. Every hour, another hour wasted. If enough time went by before Illyan called him in that he might have made it to Escobar and back, he'd be fit to chew the carpet even when not having a seizure.

He considered hauling up another bottle, and getting really drunk, in an act of sympathetic magic to make Illyan really likely to call. But nausea and vomiting tended to make time move subjectively slower, not faster. An unattractive prospect. Maybe Illyan's forgotten me.

A thin joke; Illyan never forgot anything. He couldn't. Sometime back when he'd been an ImpSec lieutenant in his late twenties, then-Emperor Ezar had sent him off to distant Illyrica, to have an experimental eidetic memory-chip installed in his brain. Old Ezar had fancied owning a walking recording device answerable to himself alone. The technology had not caught on as a commercial development, due to the 90% incidence of iatrogenic schizophrenia the chip had subsequently induced in its wearers. Ruthless Ezar had been willing to take that 90% risk for the 10% reward, or rather, had been willing for a disposable young officer to take it for him. Ezar in pursuit of his policies had disposed of thousands of soldiers like Illyan, in his lifetime.

But Ezar had died soon after, and left Illyan, like a wandering planetoid, to fall into orbit around Admiral Aral Vorkosigan, who proved to be one of the major political stars of the century. Illyan had worked Security for Miles's father, one way or another, for the next thirty years.

Miles wondered what it would be like to have thirty-five years of memories at your beck and call, as sharp and instantaneous as if just experienced. The past would never be softened by that welcome roseate fog of forgetfulness. To be able to rerun every mistake you'd ever made, in perfect sound and color . . . it had to be something like eternal damnation. No wonder the chip-bearers had gone mad. Although maybe remembering other people's mistakes was not so painful. You learned to watch your mouth, around Illyan. He could quote you back every idiotic, stupid, or ill-considered thing you'd ever said, verbatim, with gestures.

In all, Miles didn't think he'd care for a chip, himself, even if he were medically qualified. He felt close enough to schizoid dementia already without any further technological boost in that direction, thanks.